[lelanthran]

> How can you know how poorly they did it?

Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.

[jacomoRodriguez]

Improvements or just new ways to be occupied and more work? It seems life without agriculture and the like was way simpler and chilled.

[ioseph]

Until winter.

[satvikpendem]

Humans have been storing food for winter for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and the invention of writing, you think they all died off or something? People whose crops failed instead were more heavily affected in winter than hunter gatherers.

[ioseph]

Of course, but the surpluses made possible by agriculture meant occasional starvation became a much rarer event

[satvikpendem]

No, people starved way more with farming than with hunting and gathering. All in all you're under very severe misconceptions as to how farmers and hunter gatherers lived which is not supported by the evidence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3917328/

[lelanthran]

That study controls only for habitat quality, which I feel is not really relevant: hunter-gatherers are, by definition alone, nomadic. They move to where the food is!

IOW, hunter-gatherers follow the best habitat, so controlling for habitat is always going to have the conclusion this paper reached.

I'd be very interested in other studies that support this conclusion; after all, that's how science works - a single study proves nothing if many studies conclude the opposite.

[disgruntledphd2]

> then rapid progress once writing was invented.

While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.

Like, why do we talk about the Dark Ages? Because there was less writing, so obviously things were terrible.

[lelanthran]

> While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.

There's a bit of a selection bias there, because writing itself is used as a measurement of progress.

But, ignoring writing as a measurement of progress, we can pretty much see that for about 100k years the only tech were primitive tools.

Even after the domestication of wolves (about 40k years ago) there were no visible improvement in tech. After agriculture (10k-12k years ago, maybe?), there's visible progress in tech (tools), but not by much, and visible improvement in societies (also, not by much).

Enter writing - those civilisations that had more advanced writing progressed rapidly, and those that did not barely progressed at all, tech-wise.

Because not all civilisations progressed at the same rate, we can see quite clearly that writing is highly correlated[1] with progress.

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[1] While correlation does not imply causation, as the data mounts it lends more and more weight to the causation bit.

[mewpmewp2]

If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress. And so many thousands of other tech.

[lelanthran]

> If writing is a natural tech you unlock on an already exponential curve it would always correlate with progress.

That's a big "If". The observation we have is that civilisations that never invented writing simply died out with no tech-tree advancement; and this happened for 100k years at least.

We've got 100k years of "no writing, no tech". We've got around 5k years of "with writing came tech".

The actual tech to write was there for much of the 100k years (cave art), but without writing, the tech never improved.